Paraesthesia: .NET Development and Some Pictures of My Cat

Land of the Lost

I have a lot of toys in my cubicle. I won’t lie to you. They’re
everywhere. The thing is, I know where every single one of them is, and
I know what I have. If you take something, I may not notice the very
instant that it’s gone, but I will notice that it’s gone.

I was sitting today and noticed that one of my Tron
figures is missing.

My first thought was, “Those scheming rat-bastard cleaning
motherfuckers stole my figure!” Then I remembered that I have been
monitoring them with my surveillance camera nightly and have not seen
them take anything. They’d either have to be really slick or totally
innocent.

Then I thought maybe it had fallen under my desk. My file cabinets are
all on wheels (they slide under the desk; the desk is attached to the
cube walls), so I slid the closest one out. It wasn’t there. It was then
that I figured out where the figure went.

I sit next to a large, unopenable window. Now, keeping in mind that my
desk attaches to the cube walls, obviously you realize it can’t attach
to the window, right? Which means that there is a cube wall that runs at
waist height along the window, just underneath it, that the desk can
attach to. This further means that there is probably a one or two inch
gap between the window/wall and the cube wall.

Guess where the figure went.

The problem now was how to get it out. I tried fishing it out with the
retractable string attached to my work badge and a paperclip, but that
wasn’t long enough to reach down there. I opened the Venetian blinds on
the window and tried using the blind cord (the window’s probably six
feet tall if it’s an inch), and that was long enough but made me realize
that “fishing” wasn’t too accurate or easy.

The next train of thought led me to believe that if I could stick a
pole or something down there with a hook on it, that would be good. Or
the pole could have something sticky on the end that I could stick to
the figure. Either way, right? Well, nothing around here is long enough,
so I started taping pens together to make a stick with. After about ten
pens, I found that it was going to take me a good 30 pens to reach where
I needed to get to. So that plan went out the door.

The last thought I had was that I could remove the panel from the
bottom of the cube wall that the power and phone cords run through and
then I could reach under and get it… but I can’t figure out how to
get the panel off without destroying it, so that didn’t work.

I’ve given up. On my limited resources, I can’t get it out of there
without spending some serious time on it. I ended up contacting Dave the
facilities guy (nice guy, too) to help me get it out. He’s coming up
tomorrow morning.